As local elections loom, are the Conservatives missing Boris Johnson?

28 April 2024, 20:09 | Updated: 29 April 2024, 01:14

Is Boris Johnson's style of politics still alive and well in parts of the country?

Travel 250 miles from London to the Tees Valley in the North East, and a big personality mayor rules the roost in a familiar manner.

Tory Ben Houchen is someone who appears to reach over party lines for support but is loathed by political enemies to an unusual degree.

A politician who has been damned for a lack of transparency and the way he makes decisions, but opponents struggle to make accusations stick with the public.

A lover of massive infrastructure promises - tunnels, just like Johnson - that seem at best improbable. Someone who understands social media better than most of his contemporaries.

Could the political style and approach of Boris Johnson be helping Houchen, who Johnson put in the House of Lords, retain his mayoralty in the traditional heartland of Tees Valley for a third time despite the collapse of Tory support in the rest of the country?

At this point, the Tees Valley contest seems Houchen's to lose.

He won 73% of the vote when he was re-elected in 2021. At the time of writing, many think he's got a good chance of holding on, including Labour campaign figures, some in the Labour leader's office, Number 10 and CCHQ campaign team, and the Tory rebels evaluating whether to oust Rishi Sunak.

Some think a Houchen defeat would be the most likely trigger of a proper effort to oust Sunak.

Yet one of the reasons Sunak talked up Houchen's campaign to Sky News' Trevor Philips this weekend was the expectation that Houchen would be announced the winner on Friday when the Tees Valley result comes in.

Sky News went to Hartlepool in the Tees Valley, and heard from a range of voters and their views of the Tories.

In many cases, they were damning about the party and its leader Sunak. They told us that while Houchen was a "leader", they "don't think Rishi Sunak [...] has proved that to anybody". They praised Houchen for bringing investment to the area and said he got things done.

People who said they would "never" vote Tory said they were likely to back Houchen. Some who had heard about the controversies around Teesworks, the regeneration project of the former Redcar Steelworks site, still indicated they would give him their support.